Electric vehicles have proven to be a viable alternative to gasoline-powered cars. The increasing demand for electric vehicles has placed importance on the development of the associated technology and the planning of an infrastructure that will support the many electric vehicles that will be on the roads in the future.
Most of the electric vehicles currently on the market were designed and manufactured according to a recharging-model, in which a vehicle uses the same, periodically-recharged battery pack over a long period of time. This model suffers from some drawbacks, however, because it requires car owners to allot an amount of time for recharging in which the car cannot be used. Further, planning must be made to ensure that the vehicle is near a charging station when the battery needs to be recharged. This limits the use of the vehicle to certain routes, ranges, and locations.
Vehicles designed and manufactured according to a battery replacement-model, on the other hand, allow a drained battery to be replaced with a charged battery, instead of recharged. These vehicles may overcome many of the problems associated with the recharging-model if an associated battery replacement process is otherwise faster than and more readily-available than the alternative recharging process. Moreover, a replacement-battery infrastructure may be more feasible and applicable for at least some implementation areas than it's recharging-model counterpart. In order to achieve these goals a viable design would include features that address issues such as standardization, safety, ease-of-use, and logistics. However, current battery replacement-model electric vehicles have yet to find solutions for many of the problems that arise in these areas.
For example, current designs for recharging-model electric vehicles, such as that described in U.S. Pat. No. 9,045,030, call for rigid attachment of battery packs through a large number of bolts. While such a configuration helps provide rigidity and protection to the battery pack, it is not practical when the battery pack is intended to be replaced many times over the lifetime of the vehicle. While some configurations, such as U.S. Pat. No. 7,201,384 and U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2012/009804, include designs which contemplate battery replacement, there remains a need for an attachment mechanism which is quick, secure, broadly applicable to different vehicles and different batteries, and particularly suitable for automation.
The present disclosure is directed to overcoming one or more problems of the prior art.